his is what 86-year-old Cecilia Chiang can do to a person:
She can make you want to own your own business, travel
the world, speak four languages fluently, stay out dancing
till all hours, hold your liquor and maintain an appreciation
for both the finest restaurants and the diviest noodle
shacks. Wear high heels—recent foot surgery be damned—and a rock of
a ring. Drive fast and throw together a last-minute, 12-course dinner for
15 (proudly informing the guests that the steamed fish with scallions and
ginger that they’re raving about was done in the microwave). Connect with
people and remember their names. And, perhaps more than anything, have
an opinion. “I’m happy, I’m happy. I’m not happy, I’m not happy,” she says,
adding with a smile: “But usually, I’m happy.”
Chiang, who is most famously known as the founder of San
Francisco’s renowned restaurant The Mandarin—and who’s often credited
as one of the first to educate Americans about regional Chinese cuisine—
will tell you more than once that life is too short to play games. “For being
Chinese, I’m very open,” she says. On a rainy winter’s evening at Scott
Howard in Jackson Square (for which she consults), she raves about an
unctuous starter of avocado and uni, and then in comparison tells me
about an extravagant dinner she had in Spain last year.
“The chef tells me, ‘Use the straw and take it in one sip,’” she says
of one of the 36 courses that she and her younger jet-setting companions
consumed at a dinner that lasted from
8 p.m. until 2:30 in the morning. Pursing
her lips, she holds an imaginary straw
between her fingers and sucks in quickly,
breaking out in a fit of laughter at the
absurdity. “I told him, ‘This is ridiculous!
You can’t taste anything like that.’” The
chef that Chiang is speaking of is Ferran
Adrià of El Bulli, only one of the most
famous chefs in the world. “A lot of
purée, a lot of jelly” is how she describes
Adrià’s cuisine, which she likens to baby
food. “I think it’s really overrated.”
As in every photo I’ve ever seen of her, Chiang has her black hair
pulled back into a bun and eyeliner neatly applied. Her Chanel bag is hung
over the chair, she’s wearing a turtleneck and diamond studs glitter in
the lobes of her ears. She takes a sip of the Chiang-Chiang cocktail, a mix
of pomegranate syrup, pineapple juice, vodka and Champagne that the
restaurant has named after her. Just behind us, glass doors open into what’s
been christened the Cecilia Chiang Room. As if on cue, one of the waiters
interrupts our conversation to bend down and pay homage: “Ms. Cecilia
Chiang, you don’t remember me,” he says humbly of his time working at
Shanghai 1930, one of the many restaurants in San Francisco that Chiang
has consulted for. “But you are my inspiration! I remember you were
wearing a fitted Chinese silk dress for the restaurant opening 10 years ago,
and you looked so beautiful….” While he expounds reverentially, she holds
his hand warmly. Being the center of attention comes naturally to her.

“

Victor Geraci, a food-and-wine historian at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft
Library, has interviewed Chiang five times over the past few months
in order to add an oral history of her life to a collection that already
includes recordings from the likes of Chuck Williams, the 90-year-old
founder of Williams-Sonoma. “Cecilia is a Mandarin woman who has
broken all cultural and glass-ceiling barriers as far as gender and being an
entrepreneur are concerned,” he says. “And she’s probably one of the most
gracious human beings…. There is not an interview [during which] we’ve
not tried a kind of tea that she’s brought back from China. Food is the way
she expresses herself.”
But Chiang did not grow up cooking. Brought up near present-day
Beijing into a wealthy family in which meals were prepared by cooks, she
ate well and took notes. The 10th of 12 children (nine of them girls), she
was closer to her nursemaid than to her mother. She spent most of her
childhood in a Ming-era former palace that spanned a city block and was
full of beautiful gardens and ornate furniture. But in January 1943, when
she was 20 years old, the Japanese occupied China. Chiang and one of her
sisters, Teresa, were forced to set out disguised in peasant clothes (worn
over their furs) to make their way to free China, a harrowing 907-mile
journey that took five months and ended in Chong Qing, the capital of
the Sichuan province. This was not her only narrow escape. In 1949, at the
start of the Cultural Revolution, Chiang and her husband, Liang Chiang,
fled Shanghai for Tokyo on the last
plane to leave China. In Tokyo, Liang
worked at the Chinese Mission, and
Cecilia, along with some relatives,
started a 250-seat Chinese restaurant
called Forbidden City—her first foray
into the restaurant world.
If you believe, as the author
Gabriel García Márquez has said, that
life obliges us to give birth to ourselves
over and over again, Chiang’s most
enduring incarnation happened when
she flew from Tokyo to San Francisco in 1957 to support her widowed
sister. While visiting, she invested nearly $10,000 in a little restaurant
that her friends were opening on Polk Street near Chinatown. When her
friends backed out, she was left with the lease. Despite the fact that her
husband stayed behind in Tokyo (he visited only a few times a year until he
passed away 17 years ago), Chiang decided to make the restaurant work. At
a time when most Chinatown establishments were serving up greasy plates
of Chinese-American food such as chop suey and egg foo yong, Chiang
was determined to introduce Americans to truly regional Chinese food—
Peking duck, Shanghai-style braised shark fin, spicy Sichuan prawns,
Hunan beef, sizzling rice soup and pot stickers.
She named the restaurant The Mandarin, and with the help of some
kind words printed in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle, it
became such a success that Chiang moved it to Ghiradelli Square in 1967.
The restaurant—which Chiang presided over almost every day until she
sold it in 1991—drew luminaries including the Kennedy family, Princess
Grace, Elton John, John Lennon (“and his group,” as she says), Woody
Allen, Julia Child and James Beard. Chiang still sees R.W. (aka Johnny )
Apple Jr., the prolific food writer and reporter for The New York Times:
“Johnny was at last year’s [Culinary Institute of America] conference,”
she recalls. “When he saw me he said, ‘When our plane landed, I thought
about how we used to go to The Mandarin and have the minced squab in
lettuce cups and the tea duck. We just miss it so much!’”
Chiang has a daughter, May, 58, and a son, Phillip, 56, who helped
found P.F. Chang’s, the successful US Chinese-restaurant chain. Phillip
worked as a waiter at The Mandarin for years, and he remembers the

she’s one of the most
gracious human beings.
There’s not an interview we’ve
done that we’ve not had tea she’s
brought from China. Food is the
way she expresses herself.

A

lthough she’s not someone who lives in the past, Cecilia
Sun Yun Chiang has a life story worthy of a Hollywood
epic starring Gong Li. It’s one she’s retold tirelessly to
enraptured audiences—most recently to writer Lisa Weiss,
who collaborated with Nancy Oakes on Boulevard: The
Cookbook, and who is working with Chiang on a memoir with recipes. (Her
first memoir, The Mandarin Way, was published in 1974 and currently is out
of print.) “She’s really amazing because she’s got a great palate,” says Weiss.
“She can make a very simple dish delicious with very few ingredients. I’ll
go over to her house, and she’ll have this huge spread prepared.”
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”

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restaurant as an extension of his mother’s dining room. “She entertained
constantly,” he says. “She was in Beverly Hills once [where Chiang opened
another location of The Mandarin], and she invited Marion Cunningham
and Wolfgang Puck. Alice [Waters] was there. She didn’t think a thing of it.”
Phillip attributes his passion for food to his mother, but—like
everyone—he also respects her savvy business sense. In the ’60s,
“hippie types were often shunned at high-end places. But my mother
was different—she saw that this one group had rolls of cash,” he says,
chuckling at the memory. “It turned out to be Jefferson Airplane, and she
became good friends with [Grace Slick]. We used to be invited to their
studio and to the concerts. She would say, ‘Gosh, they work really hard!’”
Chiang’s career did not end with The Mandarin. Ten years ago, she
was asked by Real Restaurants to help open Betelnut in Cow Hollow—
which was ahead of its time with its open kitchen and pan-Asian small
plates—and she spent a couple of years with Shanghai 1930, which was
launched by George Chen, another former waiter from The Mandarin.
But her latest project has nothing to do with Chinese cuisine: It’s
based on her faith in a young chef who’s less than half her age, 39-year-

kinds of sashimi, red-cooked spareribs, shiitake and porcini mushrooms
with oyster sauce, spinach with garlic, asparagus with sesame seeds,
steamed fish—yes, in the microwave—and a pot of chicken stock made
with abalone). Every story of any restaurant she’s dined at includes a
blow-by-blow account of what she ate as well as an astute appraisal of it.
As she says, “A lot of people love to cook, they love to eat. But they don’t
understand food, they don’t know food.”
A few days after she’s returned from a three-week trip to China and
Japan—during which she made stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong
and Tokyo—Chiang and I have lunch at Shanghai 1930. Owner George
Chen brings out each dish with fanfare, and Chiang analyzes all of them,
from the cold mock goose made from wheat gluten served with tree-ear
mushrooms (deemed good, and just like that which she grew up eating) to
the Peking duck (she prefers the accompaniment of thin pancakes, which
“taste much better” than the thicker buns Chen serves us). As he delivers
course after course, Chen—who still refers to his former boss as Madame
Chiang—chats with her in both English and Mandarin.
They discuss SF Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer, who

old Scott Howard. The two met about three years ago when Howard was
cooking at Fork in San Anselmo, a restaurant that Chiang visited a few
times a month. Howard asked Chiang what she thought about him leaving
Fork to open a restaurant in the city. Her initial response was doubting. “I
said, ‘First thing: Overhead is high. There’s a lot of competition. You’ve got
a backer?’ I said, ‘You really need to know who’s who in San Francisco—
Who’s Gordon Getty? Wilkes Bashford?” Howard realized that Chiang
was a person with the experience and connections that he needed, so he
asked her to help. She invested money, and also got other investors on
board. “A lot of people said, ‘Cecilia, how can you do this?’ I said, ‘I think
he’s talented and has a great future.’”
In August, the unlikely duo took off for New York to research
restaurant trends—it was Chiang’s first trip on JetBlue (“cheap and
comfortable,” she says approvingly). Over the course of three days, they
ate at Alta, Cru, BLT Fish and Mario Batali’s Esca and Lupa, leaving their
hotel at 9:30 in the morning and returning after midnight. “After we’d
eaten at Esca, I said [to Cecilia], ‘I didn’t tell you because I don’t want you
to feel obligated to come, but I also have a 10 o’clock reservation at BLT
Fish,’” recalls Howard. “Her response was, ‘Well, what are we going to do
in between?’ She was so much fun.”
There’s not a night of the week that Chiang’s not at restaurant
openings, dining out with friends or entertaining at her waterfront house
in Belvedere. She’ll casually rattle off the details of a dinner that she
recently prepared for just a few friends (chicken wings, three different
100 7x7sf

has just returned from a trip to Shanghai and called to report on the
recommendations that he solicited from both of them. Chiang is
particularly in love with a noodle place called Lan Qui Fong that her friend
introduced her to on her recent trip there. “It was really a dump—they
only serve noodles—but the variety was amazing.” Despite her passion,
Chiang isn’t one to wax poetic with her descriptions: “One fresh clam,
chopped finely with garlic and ginger—very unusual and very good.”
But no matter whom you speak to, the words used to describe Chiang
herself are anything but ordinary. She’s been called relentless, a force of
nature, amazing, strong, resilient, a national treasure, an empress and a
queen bee. Of course, it takes someone as close to her as her son to have
the perspective to see that Chiang has slowed down with age. “She’s
mellowed, you know?” he says. “She’s just really enjoying herself now. And
it’s spread to the people around her.”
Indeed, it’s impossible not to be infected with Chiang’s energy. The
first time I met her, a couple of years ago, we got into her boat of a black
Mercedes (she drives herself everywhere—including, to the dismay of
some of her friends, home from late-night events in the city) to have lunch
at a little Chinese restaurant. The evening before, she’d been out until
two in the morning at the Fifth Floor, and seemed unfazed, even cheery—
inspiring me to stay out that night until the wee hours myself. Inevitably,
I went to work with a hangover, wondering what had gotten into me. And
therein lies the danger of hanging out with a woman like Cecilia Chiang—
she can make you feel very old in comparison. x
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c o u rtes y o f ceci l i a c h i a n g

(left to right): chiang posing for
a photo at the mandarin in 1981,
the year of the rooster; james
beard dining with chiang at her
belvedere home in 1972 (for which
jeremiah tower made appetizers
and a power outage forced them
to eat by candlelight); chiang
(second from front) and five of
eight sisters in 1942; phillip chiang
on his mother’s 80th birthday; alice
waters and chiang at chez panisse’s
13th anniversary; chiang and scott
howard in 2005.

“

THE WORDS USED TO DESCRIBE CHIANG
ARE ANYTHING BUT ORDINARY.
She’s been called a force of nature, amazing, strong, resilient, a
national treasure, an empress and a queen bee.

”

CREDIT TKTK TKTK

CONSUMMATE HOST:
Chiang has thrown
many a dinner party at
her home for
everyone from James
Beard to Jeremiah
Tower, who brought
like “a kilo” of
caviar to serve with
blinis once.